15. T est the movie. The video has a gradient mask applied to it (see Figure 9-17). Figure 9-17. Use blend modes to create a gradient mask for an FLV. “Getting fluid” in Piccadilly Circus Inevitably you are going to be asked to put a video in an area of a photograph. A couple of weeks ago a friend of one of the authors sent him an image of Piccadilly Circus in London. We looked at the image and thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we put the ‘got fluid?’ animation from earlier in the chapter into the pixel board in the upper-right corner of the image?” As Figure 9-18 illustrates, the problem with that is the area curves around the corner of the intersection. If the video was done right, it would follow the geometry of the area where it will be placed. The traditional approach to this problem is to place the image into Flash, draw a mask of the area that will contain the video, and then manipulate the video object with the Free Transform tool in Flash to get it to fit . . . somewhat. Figure 9-18. The video is destined for the pixel board in the upper-right corner. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 330 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 330 The issue is not one of getting it to fit. The video will need to have a bit of distortion a dded to it. Also, even though the video mask will give the illusion of a video wrapping a round the pixel board, it will still look as though it is still “flat” (see Figure 9-19). It just won’t look right because the Free Transform tool does not allow you to “bend” the lines to which it is applied. You can skew, scale, and rotate the video object, but you won’t be able to bend the video to follow the curve. Figure 9-19. Something just doesn’t look quite right. There is a solution. The answer lies in the word bend, and we have used a tool that will bend a video: the Bezier Warp effect in After Effects. Let’s “get fluid” in Piccadilly Circus: 1. Inside the Chapter 9 Exercise folder is a folder named VideoMask. Open this folder and open the Warped.ae file to launch After Effects. When the file opens, you will see that we have included the image we will be using in Flash and a QuickTime movie rendered from the “got fluid?” exercise you did earlier in this chapter. 2. Select the TextAE layer and twirl down the Distort folder in the Effects & Presets panel. Drag a copy of the Bezier Warp effect in the Distort folder on top of the video in the Comp. As you may recall, the Bezier Warp tool adds Anchor points, called vertices, and handles, called tangents, to the object in the Comp. What you are going to do is to manipulate the vertices to get the object to the proper size and then manipulate the tangents to “bend” it around the edge of the sign. 3. Drag the video and align its upper-left corner with the sign in the picture as shown in Figure 9-20. When the picture is aligned, drag the middle vertex at the bottom of the image upwards until the bottom-left corner of the video is roughly placed on the bottom-left corner of the pixel board. You may have to adjust the place- ment and size of the video because moving that vertex also moves the opposite edge inwards or outwards. THE VIDEO BEHIND THE MASK 331 9 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 331 Figure 9-20. Drag a vertex to get the size to match the pixel board. 4. With the video into position, all you need to do now is to start fiddling with the tangents. Drag the bottom-right tangent point onto the bottom-right corner of the pixel board. Notice that when you move that point, it is almost as though you were manipulating a Bezier handle in Illustrator. In fact, it is the same process. 5. Move the upper-right tangent to the upper-right corner of the pixel board. In the Comp window, change the Magnification level to 200% and start fiddling with the handles. When you finish, the edge should resemble that shown in Figure 9-21. Figure 9-21. The edge is pretty well complete. 6. Change the magnification level to 400% and move around the warp to fine-tune the placement of the handles and the edge of the video on the pixel board. You can move around the Comp window by pressing the spacebar and dragging the image. 7. When you finish, reduce the magnification to 100% and scrub through the timeline to see the effect. As you see in Figure 9-22, it looks a lot more natural than the one shown in Figure 9-19. Save the project. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 332 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 332 Figure 9-22. The image looks more natural than the one in Figure 9-19. Naturally, solving one problem raises another. Obviously this video is physically too large to be run through Flash. The Comp size matches the 550 ✕400 dimensions of the Flash stage. A video of these dimensions, especially if the file is being streamed from a web server, will not give you smooth playback. There is a way of solving this problem, and it is to render out only the video portion, not the image, of the After Effects project. The result will be a very small video (physically and in file size) that will become even smaller when it is encoded as an FLV file. Here’s how: 1. Select the Piccadilly.jpg layer and either turn off its visibility or delete it from the Comp. 2. To the left of the Toggle Alpha Transparency button in the Comp window is the Region of Interest button. Click it. A box with handles will appear in the Comp window. 3. Drag the handles, as shown in Figure 9-23, to adjust the size of the selection. What you have just done is to isolate the video on the screen. Figure 9-23. Set a region of interest to isolate the video. THE VIDEO BEHIND THE MASK 333 9 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 333 This region of interest not only isolates objects, it can also be used to crop a video to the size of the region you identify. Here’s how: 4. Add the Comp to the Render Queue. Click the Lossless link and select QuickTime movie as the Format and use the Animation codec set to Millions of Colors as the compressor. 5. Click the Crop check box and then click the Use Region of Interest check box, shown in Figure 9-24. Selecting this crop option outputs the video to the dimensions of the bounding box used as the region of interest. Figure 9-24. You can crop a video to the dimensions of the region of interest. 6. Select Audio Output and click OK to close the Output Module Settings dialog box. 7. Click the Output To link, navigate to your Exercise folder, and save the video as Warped.mov. Click OK to close the dialog box and click the Render button to create the video. 8. Save the project and quit After Effects. The next step is to run the Warped.mov file through the Flash 8 Video Encoder to create the FLV file. To make life easier for you, we’ve done this already, and have included a copy of the two FLV files— Warped.flv and Looky04.flv—that are in the VideoMask folder and will be added in Flash. Let’s put some video up in Piccadilly Circus: 1. Open the VideoMask.fla file. You will notice that we have actually created the masks and the videos for you. The masks were created by selecting the Pen tool and drawing over the area of the image where the video will appear. We then switched to the Selection tool, clicked each object , and turned off the stroke in the Property inspector . The objects were then converted into movie clips named W arped and T iago . T wo layers were added to each movie clip. One was the Actions layer and the other con- tains the video object from the Library. The video object was lined up under its mask and the mask layer was created. If you zoom in on each of the movie clips, you will see how we used the X position from the masked video object to align each clip with its pixel board on the screen. W hat you might want to do is to scrub through the timeline to ensure the edges of the video in the Comp are within the region of interest. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 334 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 334 2. S ave and test the movie. As shown in Figure 9-25, you will see Tiago looking around under the “fluid” animation. Don’t quit Flash just yet. It is your turn to be a star. Figure 9-25. Who can resist a cute puppy? Before we move on, we want to remind you that rendering only a region of interest instead of an entire video is an extremely powerful tool. By cropping a video to the dimen- sions of a region of interest, you will produce a video that is close to the dimensions needed in the Flash movie. These physically small videos, which are inevitably destined for the Flash 8 Video Encoder, will be extremely small—the FLV file used in this exercise is just over 100K in size—meaning they will load and play almost immediately. In many respects, that is the ultimate goal of anything destined for Flash playback, and one way of achieving that goal is to remove anything that adds weight to a video. As you may have guessed, the Looky04.fly file contains an alpha channel. What you can gather from this is that both regular video and alpha channel video can be used in this sort of project. THE VIDEO BEHIND THE MASK 335 9 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 335 What about you? S o far we have put an animation and a video into the pixel board. How would you like to wave at the crowds in Piccadilly Circus? One of the great things about working with Flash Video is that it will also play a feed from a web cam. If you have one, connect it to your computer and let’s put you in the TV screen beside the “got fluid?” animation. Here’s how: 1. Select the Magnifying Glass tool and zoom in on the TV screen beside the “got fluid?” animation. 2. Select the Pen tool and draw over the image on the screen. 3. Switch to the Selection tool, click the object, and, in the Property inspector, set the stroke to None. 4. With the object still selected, convert it to a movie clip named Me. 5. Double-click the Me movie clip in the Library to open the Symbol Editor. Click the shape, and, in the Property inspector, ensure that its X and Y coordinates are set to 0. 6. Add two new layers to the movie clip timeline. Place them above and below the layer holding the object. Name the top layer Actions and the bottom layer Video. 7. Select the Video layer and drag the video object from the Library into the selected layer. Give it the instance name of myVideo in the Property inspector. 8. Select the Free Transform tool in the toolbox and click the video object on the stage. The white dot in the selection is the transform point. Drag it to the upper-left corner of the selection. With the Shift key held down, click the bottom-right corner of the object and drag the corner until the right edge of the video is just touching the right edge of the black object. What you want, as shown in Figure 9-26, is for the video object to be just a bit outside of the black object. 9. Select the layer containing the object and turn it into a mask layer. 10. Select the first frame of the Actions layer and open the ActionScript Editor. When it opens, click once in the Script pane and enter the following two lines of code: var myCamera:Camera = Camera.get(); myVideo.attach Video(mycamera); Figure 9-26. Use the Free Transform tool to resize the video object. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 336 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 336 The first line of code retrieves the camera object by using the Camera.get() method and gives the camera the name of myCamera. The second line simply attaches the feed from the video camera into the video object on the stage. We wish we could say it is more difficult than that, but it isn’t. 11. Click the Scene 1 link to return to the main timeline and add a new layer named Camera to the timeline. With the Camera layer selected, drag the Me movie clip onto the stage and put it into position over the image. Save the movie. 12. Test the movie. What you will see is a warning asking you about privacy. This warn- ing simply allows the user, not you, to decide whether or not to permit the use of a microphone or a camera during the playback of the movie. Click the Allow button and you will be waving to the folks on the street as shown in Figure 9-27. Figure 9-27. The finished product You may be wondering whether you can actually have a camera feed into this sort of Flash project on your website and broadcast it to anybody that may be looking at the site. The answer is a qualified yes. To do it properly, you will need to use a Flash Media Server. Needless to say, that is well out of the scope of this book. You can pick up a free copy of the server for use on your computer at www.adobe.com/products/ flashmediaserver/ . While you are there, an excellent series of tutorials are available at www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/. Another great site to learn about how to use the server is Stefan Richter’s site at www.flascomguru.com/tutorials/. Finally, an open source “version” of the server, Red5, is available at http://osflash. org/red5 . THE VIDEO BEHIND THE MASK 337 9 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 337 Taking video for a spin A couple of months ago the authors were asked to check out a website where a company named Freedom Interactive Design was in the middle of Times Square and other New York locations selling websites. The site, www.wouldyoulikeawebsite.com, featured people wearing sandwich boards asking people on the street if they would like to own a website. What caught our attention were the sandwich boards. They contained video of fully func- tioning websites and, as the subject wearing the board moved, the video as it played on the sandwich board, Figure 9-29, also moved and maintained its perspective. Figure 9-29. Want a website? Figure 9-28. Select your web cam in the SWF Settings dialog box. I f you aren’t seeing a feed from your web cam, the odds are that Flash isn’t using the proper driver for your web cam. To fix this, right-click (PC) or Ctrl-click (Mac) on the open SWF file. This will open the Flash Player context menu. Select Settings to open the Flash Player Settings dialog box and click the Camera icon to open the Camera set- tings, shown in Figure 9-28. Select the driver from the pull-down list and click the Close button. Mac users may have a slightly different problem. If you use an iSight web cam, the iSight camera may not appear in the pull-down. Instead, select the IIDC FireWire Video option and then click the Close button. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 338 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 338 Even though Freedom Interactive Design isn’t telling how they did it, we thought we would s how you one of the techniques used in the site. It involves rotating a masked video 360 d egrees around the Y-axis, tilting it on the X-axis, and zooming it in using the Z-axis of a Comp. If you can make a video rotate and tilt in space and, at the same time, move along the Z-axis to give the illusion of depth, you are on your way to selling websites in New York. 1. Open the Spin.aep file located in the folder named Rotate. This folder can be found in your Chapter 9 Exercise folder. We have already created the Comp for you and added an Illustrator mask to the Water2.mov file on the timeline. If you scrub across the timeline, you will see water rising up and down through the key- hole mask. 2. Open the Perspective folder in the Effects & Presets panel and drag a copy of the Basic 3D effect onto the video in the Comp window. 3. Open the Effect Controls panel. This effect gives you a first peek at the power of 3D in this application. Instead of X-, Y-, and Z-axis controls, they are named Swivel, Tilt, and Distance to Image as shown in Figure 9-30. If you drag the Swivel handle, the keyhole video rotates on the Y-axis. Drag the Tilt handle, and the video rotates on the X-axis. Drag the Distance to Image slider, and the video recedes into space or returns to its original size depending upon the direction you dragged the slider. Click the Reset link at the top of the panel to return the effect to its default settings. Figure 9-30. Water in space 4. To animate this effect, twirl up the layer on the timeline and then press the E key to open the Basic 3D effect . Twirl down the effect to reveal its parameters. 5. Press the Home key to return to the 0 point of the timeline and add keyframes at the 0 point to the T ilt , Swivel, and Distance to Image parameters. Don’t forget you can “ go off of the page” with the Distance to Image value. The 0 set - ting assumes the distance is where you started, or the original size. This is a 3D effect, so double-clicking the value and entering a value of –50, for example, brings the object closer to the viewer and gives the illusion of a serious increase in size. THE VIDEO BEHIND THE MASK 339 9 7486CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 339 [...]... showed you how to create a text mask in Flash and how to use text converted to Illustrator outlines as a mask in Flash Where After Effects and Flash part ways when it comes to masking is in Flash s lack of ability to “feather” a mask as can be done in After Effects As we showed you, there is a way to do it using the blend modes and a Blur filter in Flash The next stop in our dragon hunt took us to, of all... the timeline as shown in Figure 1 0-3 10 Figure 1 0-3 A track matte is in place in After Effects 357 7 486 CH10.qxd 11/10/06 5:31 PM Page 3 58 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS When you roll over the Switches/Mode button in After Effects, you will see a tooltip that says Expand or Collapse the Transfer Controls pane When talking about it, stay with the “Switches/Mode button” terminology,... pull-down Do a RAM preview, and the water fades out towards the bottom of the word as the water in the video undulates To really have some fun with this, click the Toggle Transparency button in the Comp window to see the full effect (as shown in Figure 1 0 -8 ) 361 7 486 CH10.qxd 11/10/06 5:31 PM Page 362 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS Figure 1 0 -8 A grayscale gradient in a Photoshop... video mask in After Effects and in Flash We also showed you how to use ActionScript to add a mask to the Flash stage With the basics out of the way, our hunt led us to using text as a mask in both Flash and After Effects Though it may on the surface appear to be relatively easy to accomplish this task in After Effects, it turns out the ability to add a mask layer to the timeline is a vital skill to have... of new tricks in After Effects and how to add a Flash movie clip to the Flash movie that plays at a later point in the FLV file Also, because it is Flash s birthday, we aren’t going to get you to do a lot of work Instead, we are going to look at a couple of the highlights in the After Effects project and the Flash movie and explain to you how we did it We’ll get you to add a couple of effects that we... Page 364 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS Where this technique really rocks is when you use a grayscale image with an alpha channel It is something that is virtually impossible to do in Flash but quite easy to accomplish in After Effects Here’s how: 1 Select the AngelGray.jpg image in the timeline and delete it to remove it from the timeline Import the AngelAlpha.psd image into the... the work 343 7 486 CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 344 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS Sometimes it really is best not to overthink things and to just let the software do the work In the case of this “transformation,” playing with the shape of the mask, tweening Mask Expansion, and adjusting the Opacity values of the text is a lot easier than trying to get fancy with effects Turn... matte in After Effects can be your friend See you there 352 7 486 CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 353 7 486 CH10.qxd 11/10/06 5:31 PM Page 354 7 486 CH10.qxd 11/10/06 5:31 PM Page 355 1 0 TRACK MATTES ARE YOUR FRIEND 7 486 CH10.qxd 11/10/06 5:31 PM Page 356 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS To this point in the book, we have tended to treat masks as somewhat static They “poked holes” in solids,... Flash movie must match the frame rate of the After Effects project In fact, when you create the FLV file, its frame rate must also match the one in After Effects 349 7 486 CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 350 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 1 Open the Bumper.fla file found in the Birthday folder As you see in Figure 9-4 0, the movie consists of three layers, and the Library contains... learned from this chapter is that masking can be done in either Flash or After Effects and that each application has its limitations in this area As we keep repeating throughout the book: “Use the tool best-suited for the job at hand.” 351 7 486 CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 352 FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS The chapter started on the surface of an ocean as we showed you how to create . are a bit too bright. Tone them down by reducing the brightness and contrast. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 3 48 7 486 CH09.qxd 11/10/06 5:16 PM Page 3 48 At this point, you. may not appear in the pull-down. Instead, select the IIDC FireWire Video option and then click the Close button. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 3 38 7 486 CH09.qxd 11/10/06. shown in Figure 9-3 7, will shift position as you change the values. To see the effect in all of its glory, scrub across the timeline. FROM AFTER EFFECTS TO FLASH: POETRY IN MOTION GRAPHICS 346 7 486 CH09.qxd